My new laptop

[trace]

Hi,

I recetly bought a new acer laptop from Amazon for £449.99 .

Acer Aspire 5920G Notebook Laptop, Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0Ghz, 15.4" Display, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hard-drive, DVD±RW, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M Dedicated Graphics, WiFi, Vista Home Premium.

I thought that was a pretty good deal for a laptop with those specs. The trouble is some games play okay on it and others play soo slow as to be unplayable. I wasn't expecting the games to play soo badly.

Alone in the dark (the new one) is way too stuttery on lowest settigns to play.
medal of honor airborne plays fine on medium settings.
Bioshock plays well on medium settings, vista makes loading and quitting the game difficult though.
space siege plays badly even on lowest settings, but it's still playable.

I wasn't expecting any games problems straight out of the box since my laptop meets most of the recommeneded requirements for the games. so what's up??

Amazon laptop link:-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-5920G-Hard-drive-Dedicated/dp/B0010X94O4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1221510446&sr=8-1

[Defcon 5]

I'm dissapointed trace!

2Ghz dual core is kind old news, no?
Can't say I know much about laptops.

Your trying to run Vista and games on a 2GB RAM and rarely new games meet the requirements of 2GHz dual core cant even play COD on it if i remember correctly.

[trace]

well, I needed a laptop due to it being portable for business reasons. I was hoping to be able to play new games on it well on low/medium settings. after all for £450 I could get both an xbox 360 and a ps3!

cod4 worked on my old pc very well - and this laptop beats it hands down.

do you think if I get another 2GB ram that would greatly increase game performance?

what do you mean a core2 duo is old news? we're just into quad cores in new desktops only?

[Defcon 5]

I'm not experienced with Vista but someone I knew has a 2GB RAM installed and they said it was slow so they installed more which helped.
I would also consider stopping some of their services running in the background, run services.msc I believe


Theirs 2-3 quad core laptops out their, I expected more .

[trace]

lol yeah but they cost like £1000. you really have expected too much of me lol It's nice to see that you hold me in such high regard though.

So how do you stop things running in th ebackground apart from using task manager to stop them every time? Anyone also know how to make a game run on "high" priority all the time without using taskmanger every time th egame loads?

[Defcon 5]

do Windows key + R and put in services.msc

These are services that are running in the background, if you right click on a service you can select properties and you can select to disable it.
This will stop that service starting up every time.

I did this on a XP machine and it booted up in nearly half the time, but I disables like the majority of the list .

[trace]

Okay, next problem. I was thinking of increasing the laptops memory from 2GB to 4GB. BUt I'm hearing that 32-bit vista will only recognise 3.5GB of installed ram. it's something to do with the 32-bit environment.

So, where does my extra 512mb ram from the memory sticks go then? is it just idle or does my graphics card use it? If so how do you check it's using it???

[Defcon 5]

I would say the extra 500MB's will be used for background processes, I doubt a LOT that its not being utilised MS arn't that dumb to just drop 500mb's.
Think I've heard something like that before.

Personally I hate reading up on things you get told so much bullshit from blogs especially, they really know fuck all sometimes.

[trace]

i don't know, it seems to be quite a popular topic on google and there's alot of people saying with 4gb ram in their laptops it comes up as 3.5gb in system properties.

I wouldn't mind if the 512mb went to the graphics card.

[Defcon 5]

It will be used, too be honest it wouldn't be much use with graphics cards anyway.

Graphics cards can have a throughput speed of 30Gb's your lucky to get 4Gb's from RAM (If I remembered my A+ correctly).

Why 32bit version!... 32 bit processors can only use up to 2G of RAM. I also bought 4 pieces of Corsair 1Ghz FSB speed memory and it turned out a piece was bad. And of course, my computer is a 64 bit machine that was running XP/64 and even though 4Gig is there, the computer will only tell you that there's 3Gig on the My Computer/System Properties/General Tab

Lol theirs a lot of funny comments out thier.

But yeah seems that Vista is limited to 3.5GB's.

Everyones explinations are all over the place though confusing.

[Darksat]

Well the 4GB of memory is an option, also you may want to consider disabeling the aero effects and most of the vista Blah.
Control panel - System, Click the "windows experience index" link and "Adjust Visual Effects". set it for Adjust for best performance.
Although you may want to leave
"show thumbnails instead of icons"
"Show preview and filters in Folders" 
and
"use Visual Styles on Windows and buttons"
checked.

[trace]

luckily my vista showed 4gb of ram! it's definently the 32 bit as well. I'm thinking microsoft must have fixed it.

[Darksat]

Thats funny, a friend of mine just bought vista ultimate 64 just to acess all his 4gb of ram. must tell him when I get back to Austria (im in an irish pub in Venice  )

[sryk]

omg..thats great stuff..whats the price?

[warscar]

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